Politics Random, Random

[ti-amie]

Here we go.

Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson

RETWEET: Thousands of #MAGA supporters are splitting from the Republican Party to form the Patriot Party. I don't understand why
@realDonaldTrump won't join them? If he's a patriot he'll do so—publicly, proudly, quickly. If Trump won't join the Patriots, something's off with him.

[ponchi101]

Thousands of MAGA's won't make any difference. If you start talking hundreds of thousands, maybe in one state or another. You will need a few million to make the idea truly lethal.
But you know for whom.

What color will they choose? I recommend Brown.

[ti-amie]

Because a top Democratic operative used the word "effers" to describe the GOP Rubio went on a rant about disrespect.

Jake Tapper
@jaketapper
The stunning hypocrisy we’re beginning to see from folks who were silent for four years about vulgarities and hideous smears and more is going to require seatbelts and various safety equipment. Strap in!

[ponchi101]

It took me the incredible stupidity to actually look up "effers" in the Webster, before I got it.
Gee, I guess we have to ban that word from this forum, don't we?

[Togtdyalttai]

It would be great to see Trump run for president in 2024 for the Patriot Party.

[ponchi101]

It would be great to see Trump run for president in 2024 for the Patriot Party.

He would get more votes than whatever is left of the GOP. I think.

[ti-amie]

Scott Dworkin @funder
I just wanna be clear that Jen O’Malley Dillon didn’t call anyone a f*cker.

“I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of f*ckers,” is what Jen said. Anyone saying differently is fake news. Smiling face with sunglassesThumbs up

[ti-amie]

How Fake News Is Hatching in Immigrant Communities
Right-wing conspiracy theories are reaching Asian and Latino voters through platforms like WeChat, KakaoTalk and WhatsApp. Democrats must take notice.

By Cathy Park Hong
Ms. Hong is a poet and the author of the book of essays, “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.”

Dec. 20, 2020

In August I was on the phone with my mother, a 70-year-old Korean immigrant, to discuss the upcoming election. In the past, she had complained that President Trump was a lunatic, so I naturally assumed that she would support — or at least be neutral about — Joe Biden.

“I don’t like him either,” she told me. “He’ll be soft on China. I know all about his son Hunter’s business dealings there.”

Hearing her parrot a right-wing talking point was out of the ordinary. My mother doesn’t watch Fox News or any other English-language news. In her 40-plus years living in the United States, she has never voted. Alarmed, I began calling her more often to whack down spurious claims, as if I were playing a carnival game. Sick of my calls, my mother eventually registered to vote for the first time and voted for Mr. Biden.

But since the election, the fake news she hears has only worsened, spiking from Fox News talking points to batty QAnon-level conspiracy theories. When I ask where she gets her news, my mother simply says, everyone thinks this.

“Who is everyone?”

“Everyone!” she insists, rattling off all her friends who have told her falsehoods that George Soros or Bill Gates will control Mr. Biden. As if under the spell of a cult, my mother has a fresh new conspiracy theory for me each time we speak. Recently, she asked me if Mr. Biden stole the election — because how else could thousands of votes suddenly have appeared for him in Michigan?

While it’s well established that fake news is spiraling out of control, we must pay attention to the disinformation rapidly hatching in nonwhite immigrant communities as well. Asian-Americans are the fastest growing electorate in the nation and are becoming a powerful voter bloc as more and more live in swing states. Polls have so far shown that Asian-Americans voted for Mr. Biden by a smaller margin than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a rightward trend that Christine Chen, executive director of the nonpartisan civic organization APIAVote, said could be partly because of an influx of disinformation. With the upcoming U.S. Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats cannot afford much slippage.

Right-wing conspiracy theories have infiltrated Asian and Latino communities through social media platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, KakaoTalk and YouTube. Organizers say that older immigrants who don’t consume mainstream English-language media can be more susceptible to disinformation about American politics. “Disinformation is really hard to track because it isn’t just contained in the continental U.S. but being lobbied from friends and family from, let’s say, Colombia,” María Teresa Kumar, chief executive of Voto Latino, said. “Democrats don’t understand how deep it is.”

Nonwhite voters are the Democratic Party’s base, but the party has ignored them, assuming that the Republican Party’s racist and nativist politics would be enough to mobilize them. An APIAVote survey conducted this past summer found that half of Asian-Americans had not been contacted by either party. This is typical. Asian-Americans have historically been left out of voter outreach efforts because they make up just under 6 percent of the nation and cluster in blue coastal states. Trying to engage an atomized demographic that speaks dozens of different languages can also pose a challenge to political organizers.

Asian-Americans and Latinos both comprise dozens of different nationalities, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions about their voting patterns. But anti-communism has traditionally been part of the Republican Party’s appeal to older immigrants, and disinformation that paints the Democratic Party’s platform as socialist has reinforced that appeal, especially among some older Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese immigrants who fear anything left-of-center teeters too close to the Chinese Communist Party. Right-wing groups have also used WhatsApp and WeChat to smear the goals of Black Lives Matter, warning that mass riots were to occur on Election Day, to deter Asian and Latino immigrants from going out to vote.

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It’s nearly impossible to chase down all the disinformation scattered across the globe. It’s spread by former Trump aides, foreign governments and a Falun Gong-backed media empire determined to take down the Chinese government. Steve Bannon partnered with the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui to plant bogus stories of hidden business dealings by the Biden family in China, which then went viral among the Chinese diaspora. Nguyen Dinh Thang, president of the civil society organization Boat People SOS, has noticed many Vietnamese-language Facebook pages, some with tens of thousands of followers, spreading falsehoods about the U.S. elections to Vietnamese nationals and immigrants.

The disinformation that reaches my mother from ethnic language platforms is often traced to Mr. Trump himself. My mother doesn’t get her news from conservative Korean YouTube channels or the messenger platform KakaoTalk. She hears it over the phone from friends, some of whom recently told her that hospitals have been inflating Covid-19 death numbers to qualify for more insurance money. She had no idea the president falsely claimed that during a rally in October.

If the global ubiquity of fake news is not addressed, it could continue to peel away minority community support that Democrats count on. Disinformation has been weaponized to poach on immigrant fears so that, like their white working-class counterparts, some Asian and Latino immigrants are voting against their economic interests. With tech giants refusing to provide serious oversight, fake news not only exploits their fears of socialism but provokes any latent anti-Black prejudices, warning that to “defund the police” would lead to anarchy.

Democrats and progressives must be surgical in their canvassing, and train many more bilingual volunteers to reach out to immigrant voters via social media and in-person, finding trusted messengers who take the time to build relationships with community leaders. Grassroots organizations like the Georgia-based Asian American Advocacy Fund, VietFactCheck and Asian Americans Against Trump have been committed to that labor.

Lastly, for progressives who come from immigrant families, it’s up to us. We must use our blood connections to counter these lie machines by engaging with our families and friends about, for instance, the crucial importance of the Georgia Senate elections or the detailed policies behind the “defund the police” movement that can help stop cops from killing Black people.

In November, Asian-Americans came out in record numbers and helped deliver swing states like Georgia to Mr. Biden. In Georgia’s Seventh District, which flipped from red to blue this election, 41 percent of the electorate were first-time voters as a result of grass-roots efforts and family outreach. I talked to one Korean-American woman who said she was flying to Atlanta to escort her mother, who had never voted before, to the polls.

My own mother now asks me about every story she hears. Granted, she also has other motives. “If I tell you what I hear,” she said, “then I know you’ll call me back.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/opin ... rants.html

[ponchi101]

I wrote a little bit about in my last blog (tat1.0). A good friend told me: "Venezuela never had a chance. We were the guinea pigs for this election". By that he meant that Smatmatics, the company being talked about for "stealing" the election, was simply a test run in Venezuela, when they DID steal the referendum in 2004.
I was aghast. I consider him rather smart (he is in Australia, another exile).
And all of my GF's stupid friends in Miami voted for Tiny, because "Biden will be soft on Venezuela". The fact that Tiny has been in power for four years and Maduro is doing fine simply does not register.

We will be defeated by stupidity. It is only a matter of how many "we" are.

[ti-amie]

This is happening in the African-Caribbean community as well.

[ti-amie]

Don't mess with people from Venezuela.


Last week, a lawyer for Antonio Mugica sent scathing letters to Fox, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name.Credit...Niklas Hallen/Getty Images

The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media
Voting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.

By Ben Smith
Published Dec. 20, 2020
Updated Dec. 21, 2020, 6:06 a.m. ET

Antonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.

It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.

Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.

“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”

But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”

Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.

“Sidney Powell is out there saying that states like Texas, they turned away from Dominion machines, because really there’s only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, so you can easily change votes,” the Newsmax host Chris Salcedo said in one typical mash-up on Nov. 18. Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”

Here’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”


Now, Mr. Connolly’s target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.

“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.

Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that “we are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.”

These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.

And so Newsmax and OAN appear likely to face the same fate as so many of President Trump’s sycophants, who have watched him lie with impunity and imitated him — only to find that he’s the only one who can really get away with it. Mr. Trump benefits from presidential immunity, but also he has an experienced fabulist’s sense of where the legal red lines are, something his allies often lack. Three of his close aides were convicted of lying, and Michael Cohen served more than a year in prison. (Trump pardoned Michael Flynn and commuted the sentence of Roger Stone.)

OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.

The letters written by lawyers for Smartmatic and Dominion are “extremely powerful,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers, in an email to The New York Times. “The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both.”

Mr. Abrams noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.

“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”

Lawyers said they expected that the right-wing networks, if sued, would argue that Smartmatic and Dominion should be considered “public figures” — which would require the companies to prove that its critics were malicious or wildly reckless, not just wrong.

Mr. Connolly said he would argue that Smartmatic was not a public figure, a legal status whose exact meaning varies depending on whether Mr. Mugica files suit in Florida, New York or another state.

“They have a very good case,” another First Amendment lawyer who isn’t connected to the litigation, the University of Florida professor Clay Calvert, said of Smartmatic. “If these statements are false and we are taking them as factual statements, that’s why we have defamation law.”

Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.

Newsmax said in an emailed statement that the channel “has never made a claim of impropriety about Smartmatic, its ownership or software” and that the company was merely providing a “forum for public concerns and discussion.” An OAN spokeswoman didn’t respond to an inquiry.

I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.

And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.

In this controversy, even the voting companies’ worst critics find the coverage wildly distorted.

“They’ve been mining every paper I’ve ever written and any deposition I’ve ever given and it’s nonsense,” said Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has long argued that voting software isn’t as secure as its vendors claim. He said Ms. Powell’s cybersecurity expert, Navid Keshavarz-Nia, called him on Nov. 15, apparently seeing him as a potential ally, and spent an hour going point-by-point over claims that would wind up in a deposition. “He seemed sane, but every time I would ask him for evidence that would support one of these allegations he would squirm off to a different allegation,” Mr. Jones said.

As the conversation wore on, he wondered, “Was someone trying to pull a ‘Borat’ on me?”

But the allegations are no joke for Smartmatic and Dominion. Mr. Mugica said he had taken worried calls from governments and politicians all over the world, concerned that Mr. Trump’s poison will seep into their politics and turn a Smartmatic contract into a liability.

“This potentially could destroy it all,” he said.

Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.

“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/busi ... x-oan.html

[ti-amie]

I read this last night and Ive been thinking about his premise ever since. I don't play video games especially the super immersive ones for the very reason's laid out here. After awhile where does fantasy end and reality begin? There is a lawsuit in Massachusetts I think against a brokerage firm called "Robin Hood" where the plaintiffs say this company has turned investing into a game and that people are losing their money. They talk about it on this weeks Slate Money.

Seth Abramson

QAnon is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It was set up that way and is managed that way. QAnoners are playing an ARG and refuse to stop for the very reason transreality gaming can be hazardous: you can forget what's game and what's reality. QAnoners are lost in a dangerous game.

The reason this matters is that Trump and his agents aim to expand the gamification of reality beyond the confines of QAnon's ARG mythology. Now they're turning the finding of evidence of "election fraud" into a transreality game with its own mythology. All of this is dangerous.

When we think of the far right as a space of "fake news" rather than the gamification of reality, we falsely accept the notion that Trumpists are interested in news. They're not. They're interested in tailored escapism, and in redefining reality as a mythology they can live with.

When you misdefine someone as simply an indiscriminate "news consumer" rather than deeming them a LARPer—Live-Action Roleplayer—you erroneously analyze their characteristics and erroneously model their behavior.

Trump himself is an ARG—and people enjoy the game too much to stop.

Trump and his agents are deliberately creating a new intelligence theater, in which intelligence agents must "enter the game"—yes, a bit akin to entering a Matrix—to combat the seditious ends Trump, Flynn and others intend to direct their ARG to. It's all weird digital-age stuff.

By this same logic, QAnoners cannot be reached by *real* news presented to them in *conventional* terms.

Instead, intelligence agents will end up infiltrating the Trumpist QAnon ARG with the "real" using scenarios in which the "real" *momentarily* seems to be part of the "game."
This is why I described the Trump era as the First Reality War, and urged folks in intel to treat reality as an active combat theater. Government will need many more digital-age cultural theorists than it anticipated. Not cyber folks—I mean world-builders and their interlocutors.

The good news: the generation coming up gets transmedia, transreality, XR, ARGs, pervasive gaming, immersive theater, reality mining, gamification, collaborative OSINT and the like far more than their elders. Which is key, as much of the Trumpist threat will come in such spheres.

For instance, "Communism" exists in Trumpist mythology the same way Shinra did in Final Fantasy VII: as an in-game construction defined by narrative utility and seamless integration with a UX. Trumpists have no idea how the term connects to anything actually happening in America.

So Trumpists can't be deprogrammed from their sense of what Communism—or for that matter socialism—means in meat space, as their (false) consciousness of these terms is the product of an in-game "economy." You either change their game or get them to stop playing. Both are *hard*.

But put aside intelligence and counterintelligence.

What this means for the average American is that you may have members of your family or certain acquaintances who you can no longer speak to because *even when they are talking to your face* they are playing a transreality ARG.

My advice to those with Trumpists or QAnoners they still want to interact with: you have to find ways to get them to *put the ARG aside* momentarily. Which is hard, because Trump and his team are daily expanding the size of the ARG to try to make it *roughly the size of reality*.

The best many of us can do right now is to try to draw these LARPers into non-game spaces in which they have non-game interactions with non-game participants—and to try to make such spaces and interactions of such high entertainment value that the game begins to seem unnecessary.

But you don't address the situation by trying to introduce "real news" (qua news) directly into the situation, as you are dealing with someone whose interest is in entertainment rather than news—and whose fundamental complaint is with reality itself, not with information streams.

I teach digital-age cultural theory, XR literacy, mass communications, post-postmodernism, digital journalism and transmedia worldbuilding at the university level—while my recent books are classified as being on the subject of intelligence and espionage—so these are my interests.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1339 ... 77186.html

[ponchi101]

Don't mess with people from Venezuela.

...
The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media
Voting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/busi ... x-oan.html

For what it's worth.
Smartmatic ran the software and hardware for the 2004 REFERENDUM in Venezuela, proposed by the opposition to oust Chavez. Run by the National Electoral Council (CNE, and nothing like the American Electoral College), the software used by Smartmatic was never audited by independent experts. This was frequently requested but the CNE did not allow it, and Smartmatic never obliged (they could not).
I knew the guy that designed the software; he was a teacher at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, the premier STEM school in the country. He designed the software so that it would count NO votes (Chavez DOES NOT STAY) up to a point, and the YES votes (Chavez STAYS) freely. So, for example, you would have three adjacent machines reaching 177 NO votes, but a larger count of YES, which were uncapped.
I knew two other professors at the school, and they confirmed that: he had rigged the vote. Being a Chavez' supporter, he could not be fired (and there were no proofs) but the entire faculty black-balled him due to his unethical position. After being subject to a break-in and robbery, he was given a position in the Barcelona Consulate. He had no diplomatic experience.
The husband of a friend had stock in Smartmatic. He was able to see what they had done and sold his shares, a bad financial move as Smartmatic ran all elections in Venezuela for years and was very profitable.
So: do I believe Smartmatic rigged this election? No. But many Venezuelans do (I mentioned that in a different post); the simple mentioning of Smartmatic does that. Plus, these guys are not the Barefoot Carmelites (an office in Barbados, run by a Venezuelan? Is that smell the rotting fish on the beach or...?). But Smartmatic has a strong case: they solely ran the L.A. election and therefore it is hard to say they rigged an election that was nationwide. Venezuelans, of course, are too stupid to see also the other points: Why rig four states when rigging only one (i.e NY) gives you the same result? Also, Smartmatic would have gone to the highest bidder, and that would have been Tiny. The final item usually escapes their mental grasp: how can the OPPOSITION rig an election?

So, I do not think Smartmatic rigged this one or was involved. But it was not because of their deep democratic beliefs or the purity of their soul. They simply were not offered the job or had no way to carry it.
But that these guys are as unethical as they come, no doubt. John Gotti would feel right at home with them.
(Remember. I am Venezuelan, and always was against the regime. So take my comments with the proper dose of skepticism).

[ti-amie]

Thanks ponchi. I'm sure the folks who mentioned Smartmatic know this background. I'm also sure most US jounalists don't have a clue and with so few foreign newsrooms these days Tiny's people can run with this, or felt they could.

[ti-amie]

California Governor Picks Alex Padilla to Fill Harris’s Senate Seat
Padilla will become state’s first-ever Latino senator



By Christine Mai-Duc
Dec. 22, 2020 1:00 pm ET

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday named California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to fill the Senate seat being vacated by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, giving the state its first-ever Latino senator.

(More to come)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/california ... 1608660041